onefrombills
02-04-2009, 02:27 AM
LAS VEGAS - Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and Las Vegas Events officially welcomed the United States Bowling Congress and the 2009 USBC Open Championships to the Entertainment Capital of the World at a "sneak peek" press conference on the tournament lanes Tuesday.
The event gave the local media and invited guests their first look at the transformed Cashman Center, which is now a 60-lane state-of-the-art bowling facility that will host more than 85,000 tournament bowlers during the record 154-day run of the 2009 Open Championships.
Since Dec. 15, construction crews have been hard at work making the 25-year-old venue nearly unrecognizable to Las Vegas locals. In addition to the 60 lanes, the facility also includes office and vendor space, a custom trophy case, squad room, scale room, lounge area and spectator seating for more than 300.
Guests Tuesday also got a sample of the capabilities of the tournament's new scoreboards, which feature enhanced graphics with 4.4 trillion colors and streaming video. The setup, which marks the first scoreboard modification since electronic scoring was introduced in 1979, will be tagged as the world's largest mobile scoreboard.
To wrap the event up Tuesday, Mayor Goodman became the first bowler to throw a ball down one of the newly-installed lanes.
The Open Championships officially will kick off on Feb. 21 and run from 7 a.m. until 2 a.m. each day until July 24. This year's event will feature 17,200 teams, making it the second-largest in history. The most teams to compete on the tournament lanes was 17,285 in 1995, the year the National Bowling Stadium in Reno, Nev., opened its doors for the first time.
Leading up to the start of the Open Championships, the tournament lanes will play host to the USBC Masters, one of four majors on the Lumber Liquidators Professional Bowlers Association Tour (Feb. 9-15) and the Special Olympics National Unified Tournament (Feb. 19 and 20).
The event gave the local media and invited guests their first look at the transformed Cashman Center, which is now a 60-lane state-of-the-art bowling facility that will host more than 85,000 tournament bowlers during the record 154-day run of the 2009 Open Championships.
Since Dec. 15, construction crews have been hard at work making the 25-year-old venue nearly unrecognizable to Las Vegas locals. In addition to the 60 lanes, the facility also includes office and vendor space, a custom trophy case, squad room, scale room, lounge area and spectator seating for more than 300.
Guests Tuesday also got a sample of the capabilities of the tournament's new scoreboards, which feature enhanced graphics with 4.4 trillion colors and streaming video. The setup, which marks the first scoreboard modification since electronic scoring was introduced in 1979, will be tagged as the world's largest mobile scoreboard.
To wrap the event up Tuesday, Mayor Goodman became the first bowler to throw a ball down one of the newly-installed lanes.
The Open Championships officially will kick off on Feb. 21 and run from 7 a.m. until 2 a.m. each day until July 24. This year's event will feature 17,200 teams, making it the second-largest in history. The most teams to compete on the tournament lanes was 17,285 in 1995, the year the National Bowling Stadium in Reno, Nev., opened its doors for the first time.
Leading up to the start of the Open Championships, the tournament lanes will play host to the USBC Masters, one of four majors on the Lumber Liquidators Professional Bowlers Association Tour (Feb. 9-15) and the Special Olympics National Unified Tournament (Feb. 19 and 20).